"Pastor Yoo, we want you to decide. She won't listen to me. I cannot control where she goes after work. If she keeps meeting with that goat, he'll do something terrible, and no one will care what happens to her. She'll listen to you," the brother said quietly. "She has to."

The quote above is Korean American Harlem-based author and journalist Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko, which traces a Korean family’s immigration to Japan, with unfoldings of ableism, patriarchy and assimilation experienced and interconnected through varied magnitudes. The quote references an argument between two siblings from Jeju, who were living in Osaka in the 1900s. The brother’s asking a pastor to prevent his sister from seeing — for lack of a better term — a sugar daddy. With invasive discussions between her brother and Pastor about consent and her body, the sister maintains that she needs this relationship to support her parents.

This excerpt isn’t a main part of the story, but the desperation in it reverberates as the book’s overarching theme of how values are attached to gender roles with dehumanization as a consequence of those left unfulfilled. If the brother isn’t able to ‘protect’ his sister, the harm caused to her puts his masculinity and humanity at risk of being incomprehensible. Why should the sister have to bear this burden imposed on him, while navigating a patriarchy that’s built to prevent her survival?

Gender essentialism is the architect of what we expect to build for each other, and how we erase ourselves by accommodating what we haven’t learnt how to discard from the generation before.

“Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know…For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life—but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman—just ourselves,” Mrs. Jun from the market tells protagonist Sunja early in the book, setting its tone.